Baruch Spinoza

Background

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish descent, expelled from Amsterdam's Sephardic community in 1656 and thereafter a private scholar who supported himself grinding lenses. His Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 and laid out in Euclidean geometrical form, is the most rigorous necessitarian system in the Western canon: one substance — "the eternal and infinite Being, which we call God or Nature" — which "acts by the same necessity as that whereby it exists" (Spinoza, Ethics IV, Preface).

Spinoza matters to this wiki as the road not taken within rationalism. He wields a Principle of Sufficient Reason at full strength — "Of everything whatsoever a cause or reason must be assigned, either for its existence, or for its non-existence" — and concludes from it that "no cause or reason can be given, which prevents the existence of God," so God "necessarily does exist" (Spinoza, Ethics I, Prop. 11, second proof). But this necessarily existent God is immanent Nature, not a free transcendent Creator: the same principle Leibniz rode to theism, Spinoza rides to necessitarian monism.

Positions held in this wiki

• The Leibnizian (Contingency) Cosmological Argument — the standing dilemma for every contingency arguer: keep the full-strength PSR and risk proving Spinoza's God instead of Abraham's, or weaken it and lose the proof. Filed under stance naturalistic with the caveat that Spinoza's own vocabulary is relentlessly theological.

Key works in our corpus

• Ethics (1677, Elwes trans.) — in corpus. Key passages: Part I, Prop. 11 (the sufficient-reason proof of necessary existence); Props. 14–15, 29, 33 (substance monism and the denial of contingency); Part IV, Preface (Deus sive Natura; nature "does not work with an end in view").
• Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) — in corpus. The founding document of modern biblical criticism: Spinoza asks, among his preface's programmatic questions, "whether miracles can take place in violation of the laws of nature, and if so, whether they imply the existence of God more surely and clearly than events, which we understand plainly and distinctly through their immediate natural causes" (Spinoza, TTP Preface §41) — a full seventy years before Hume's essay on miracles.

Principal critics

• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the rationalist rival who accepted the PSR but insisted the necessary being is transcendent and chooses among possible worlds (Monadology §53).
• Thomas Aquinas — the classical framework on which no created or composite thing can be the necessary being; the modern mereological form of this objection (O'Connor, via SEP) is pressed in the article above.
• Contemporary critics of necessity-of-the-universe views — O'Connor, and Rundle's matter-necessitarianism as a foil — are cited via the SEP in the article; primary texts not in corpus.

See also

• David Hume — Philo's Part-9 hint that the a priori argument "affords an inference directly opposite to the religious hypothesis" is Spinoza's position in miniature.
• David Friedrich Strauss — the nineteenth-century biblical criticism the Tractatus made possible.
• J. L. Mackie — a twentieth-century heir on the critique of objective religious metaphysics.
• Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides, Rambam) — the Jewish philosophical tradition Spinoza inherited and broke from.